Raudive - Chamber Music

Raudive - Chamber Music
Raudive's Chamber Music opens beautifully. For ten minutes "Is It Dark in Here?" delivers the album's aesthetic encapsulated—its total experimentalist, minimalist darkness. This isn't to say that what follows is only derivation. No, what comes in the subsequent hour is a deconstruction. Techno as a form is isolated by its elements, put into moments and, at times, melded with a semblance of modern classical music. We aren't meant to hear a standard 4/4 kick and hi-hat pattern over arrangements of strings and voice. Rather, we hear a focus on the negative space that has slowly been built by DJs in clubs for years. This very post-modern examination is wherein much of Chamber Music's appeal lies.

Each of the nine tracks is built upon similar parts. The drum kit and synthetic treatments seem sparse until the wonderful "Over," whose predominant sound is a dense pad that hangs gloomily like gray clouds above an open field. Where Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92 complemented its melodiousness with reverb, Raudive utilizes his minimalist intentions and repurposed sounds like the bells and wind chimes in "Khaki," and builds out his mixer sends and inserts with clever shadow. Many sampled voices populate Chamber Music's grottos. Each is its own instrument, used percussively or tunefully throughout. On "X-Ray" we find a female voice dictating abstractly. In "Brittle" a man's syllables brush up against a repeated organ note. More often than not, they sound cold and austere.

What seems most organic about Chamber Music, instead, are its arrangements. They don't slink on like Burial's slow-to-canter dubstep. Nor do they seem to be anything but a sequenced sound. The human element is there. Getting rid of it, despite the way he uses vocal shards, is not his aim. Chamber Music doesn't quite end where it began. It's transportive, and it moves intellectually through deconstruction. "Sienna," the album's last four-and-a-half minutes, is an ambient piece just outside the bounds of what we might expect from someone like Tim Hecker. It gathers itself up from dust and vinyl crackle, and a guitar is manipulated, strummed, post-rave in the most literal sense.